Threats to Fantasy in the Facebook Family

Copenhagen.
The next speaker at COST298 is Brian Simpson, who also focusses on social networking, in this case in the context of the family. This relates especially to children's rights in cyberspace, to new parenting ideologies stressing surveillance and safety, and to the boundaries of childhood. Concern and overconcern regarding child safety have led to the development of new approaches to regulating family life through increased official guidance for parents - this may change what families are, in fundamental and unexpected ways. A related problem here is the overemphasis on child safety in relation to the Internet - and this also fails to consider its effect on family relationships through the externalisation of fantasies.

Parents now regularly track their children's online activities, thus finding out much more about their children's activities than has traditionally been the case (even if the core of those activities hasn't necessarily changed much); it remains difficult for them, too, to correctly interpret what of what they see online is fantasy or reality, potentially leading to misunderstandings that can have severe repercussions for family life.

In the process, families lose a lot of private space; how do they cope with this? Will it increase mutual suspicion between parents and children? Indeed, some parenting guidelines now redefine good parents as monitoring parents. A further effect may be the loss of identity that results from the blurring of public and private - as friendship, for example, becomes a meaningless, tradeable commodity online.

The family is becoming a site of fantasy surveillance, as parents are now asked to engage with the fantasices of their children (and as spouses intrude into the psychic spaces of one another). What are the implications of this shift? Is there a point to fantasy which requires it to be kept private - so that the public sharing devalues fantasy, disables our ability to imagine?

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